Monday, April 07, 2008

Mark Penn: Microtrends

In the October 1st, 2007 talk organized by Google above, Mark Penn explained the importance of non-locally created communities "by choice", of the role of microtrends, diverse and relatively small groups that nevertheless influence the society significantly, of the corresponding shift towards tolerance, of the "new geeks", including women, of the missing handbooks for fathers who are old, and so on. This increased-aspect-ratio visual counterpart of Barton Zwiebach is a very smart guy! ;-)

He also emphasizes that the voters are not idiots - a nice assumption that can turn against you as soon as it becomes false which is probably the case of the Democratic primaries. And he correctly points out that the "working and middle class" understands many of the real life issues much better than the "elites" who are now detached from it. Very true. Many other trends that are reshaping the society are mentioned, too. For example, terrorists tend to be middle-IQ people. Intelligent enough to frantically absorb an ideology, dumb enough to overlook that the ideology is stupid. Aggressive anti-physics cranks probably have to satisfy the same constraint.

The current U.S. Democratic Party seems to be dominated by the microtrend of cheap and stinky stuff like DailyKos.COM so it is not too surprising that Mark Penn was removed from Clinton's campaign. Hillary Clinton is being dumb if she doesn't support the free trend in the Americas - and I am convinced that Bill Clinton should spank her properly for her disparaging of his legacy - but to fire the chief strategist because he does support the free trade is a completely different level of being a bad girl.